About Me

I am Peter Azuolas, a seasoned technology executive currently serving as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at PANDA Interactive in Las Vegas, Nevada.

With a robust background in engineering and software development, I have dedicated myself to advancing technology in various roles, including my previous positions as CTO at SportsCastr and SportsBlog.com.

With a focus on developing highly scalable UGC platforms, I've led teams and developed software that have handled billions of server events monthly with high availability and extremely low operating costs.

With PANDA's focus on the online gaming markets, I have deep knowledge of OSBs, betting, and betting marketing. As a material participant, I am licensed as a tech provider in all currently legal betting states.

On a personal level...

I am a knowledge sponge, with infinite curiousity and a love of learning. I absorb information on nearly any topic ranging from the mundane (baking) to the esoteric (modern chip fabrication) and am constantly looking for the next topic.

I am borderline trilingual: English, Lithuanian (intermediate), and French (novice - better reader then speaker).

I follow F1 and Professional Cycling. Both sports appeal to my technical side with deep levels of information and analysis hiding just below the surface for those that want to find it.

Outside of programming, my hobbies include CNC machining (I have a Tormach 770 CNC mill), photography (I'm a micro 4/3rds fan), and listening to audiobooks.

I am also a novice art collector with 4 Heinrich Lossow originals (ask me about the intracies of buying a painting from an Italian auction) and a collection of Mondo screenprints (including the Back to the Future triptych).

Professional

My professional life has been deep and fufilling with a focus on sports technology and video streaming over the last decade. My experience runs the gammut from high traffic UGC to high-touch SaaS platforms for whitelabel use by major companies.

I've developed software for, or used by, the NFLPA, NBPA, WNBPA, WNBA, and other leagues and PAs. I've worked on crypocurrency projects, including launching the first SaaS for cryptocurrency miners in the early days of Bitcoin.

I have developed a number of patented technologies that form an integral part of the modern sports betting and streaming markets.

PANDA Interactive
CTO, Founding Partner
PANDA Interactive, based in Las Vegas, Nevada, is a technology company that specializes in enhancing live and on-demand video experiences with interactive features. Our platform enables the creation of "view and do" experiences that keep viewers engaged and ready to buy, integrating powerful in-stream commerce fully integrated with Shopify and brand-safe social interactivity such as moderated chat. PANDA's solutions are used across various industries, including online betting, live events, and sports media, and can be fully white-labeled and deployed at scale.

PANDA offers two main products: PANDA Studio and CUB. PANDA Studio (studiopanda.live) is designed to upgrade video content into Watch & Bet experiences, allowing sports media companies and affiliate networks to transform their video content into interactive, revenue-generating assets. PANDA CUB (cubpanda.com) is a tool that transforms articles into engagement powerhouses, unlocking new revenue opportunities for sports media companies and affiliate networks. Both products leverage PANDA's patented SocketVision technology, which rapidly ingresses and normalizes data from any source, bringing it to life with real-time visuals, betting odds, and overlays synchronized with live or pre-recorded video.

As CTO, I've helped develop the platform, technology, and IP that power our products. From integration of custom AI models and deep learning, to advancements in streaming, interactivity, and engementment, we have developed a powerhouse of technology.
SportsCastr.com
CTO, Founding Partner
SportsCastr was a live streaming Sports Commentary website (think twitch for sports), with our first external investor being the late David Stern, the commissioner emeritus of the NBA (nice guy, sharp as a whip and quick to catch mistakes). Our lead investor was Donald Schupak, known as the lawyer behind "The Greatest Sports Deal of All Time". Other investors and partners include Vernon Davis, Billy Owens, Jim Boeheim, Steve Smith, and Richard Sherman. In addition, the NFLPA and Intel are partners are part owners of the business via their development fund.

At the unique intersection of UGC, Online Gaming, and video streaming, SportsCastr presented many challenges and I helped developed software and IP that even today form a vital part of online sports streaming and betting.
SportsBlog.com
CTO, Founding Partner
I was a founding partner and CTO of SportsBlog.com, the largest open sports blogging platform on the internet with about 5 million dollars in funding before I left. I personally wrote the backend that was processing over 4 billion server requests a month at its peak with 99.97% uptime.

It was here that I first developed the skills needed to scale large UGC products to massive traffic numbers on a minimal operating budget. The unique challenges of scaling UGC were magnified here with a massive archive of cold long-tail content mixed with extremely high traffic viral articles.
SOTL (School of the Legends)
Interim CTO
I served as the interim CTO for SOTL, a NFLPA/NFLRPA owned social network for current and former NFL players. I was brought in to "fix" the mess that the original team/developers made and helped shepherd the platform back into a usable and valuable property.
BrandLab
Lead Developer
BrandLab was a incubator in the domain industry. Centered around the management and monetization of a large portfolio of domains, it's focus was on developing MVPs and incubating project ideas. As the lead developer, it was my job to take vague ideas and make them into realities.

Personal Projects

I've always felt that that best way to learn something is to do it. Personal projects should be grounded in a passion, but curiosity driven at heart.

If someone else gets value from them, great, but if not I still learned new tricks, refreshed old ones, and enjoyed myself.

My current public personal projects are:

RecentMusic.com

I love music, and have an addiction to hearing the latest releases from artists I listen to. Unfortunately, Spotify has limited tools for the discovery of new releases, so RecentMusic.com was developed as a way to feed my addiction.

I used it as an excuse to live at the bleeding edge of static site generation technology, and developed the site using AstroJS.

With a truly MASSIVE amount of data, a build of RecentMusic.com contains over 240,000 files and directories, exclusive of the visual assets. So large, and with such frequent updates, that it "breaks" github, I've developed custom build and deployment systems that allow the system to operate in a fully hands off manner.

Includes a fully automated print-on-demand store at shop.recentmusic.com, people can purchase one of over 5 thousand custom designs.

Leveraging multiple new technologies, including AI image generation, AI consensus research, deep API integrations and complex data warehousing, it's been a challenge to create a site with such depth and breadth while still keeping it cheap to operate.

Still under development, the public side has been released but the member features are still in closed alpha. No marketing or traffic growth has yet been attempted, and yet despite this, RecentMusic.com is receiving thousands of visitors a month purely from search engines and word of mouth and the wait list for membership is growing.

Learning: AstroJS SSG, AI integration, API integration, Data Warehousing, CDN development, React based SPA member section, Print On Demand, API based item creation

SampleImages.com

I've been watching the evolution of AI with excitement, especially fascinating is the quickly evolving space in image generation.

Between closed (OpenAI) to "open" (Flux, StableDiffusion, etc) the possibilities are pretty endless as to the type of images you can create if you are creative and patient.

SampleImages.com grew out of my experiments and the 10s of thousands of images I have created over time. Every 10 minutes, a new image from my archives is passed into a Vision AI for description and tagging and a Astro SSG site rebuilds.

While I find it entertaining to just browse the results, the site is intended to help people see some of the possibilities for AI generated imagery.

Learning: Image Generation AI, AI API development, Vision AI usage for classification and description, AstroJS SSG.

BloodMouth.com

While I was involved in the domain name industry in the past, it has been a number of years since I had more then a surface level interaction with the industry. I touched on all aspects from sales, portfolio management, parking, acquisition, MVP development, and drop catching.

These days, my interaction with the modern domain industry is mainly as a buyer and acquisition consultant. I sometimes help friends try to get the domains they want for their projects.

I came across the term "blood mouth" (a mild insult used by some vegans to describe those that eat meat) and saw the name was going to drop soon so I dipped my toes back into the drop catching industry. The landscape has changed with most of the registrars themselves preventing the names from relisting and instead auctioning or direct selling them.

Once I had the name, I needed something to do with it, so a tongue-in-cheek tshirt store seemed like a good idea. I hired a couple of artists for the art work, and used it as an opportunity to familiarize myself with a few new-to-me industries.

Learning: Modern domain market, ecommerce with Shopify, building custom Shopify themes, talent management and hiring via Fiverr, Print On Demand.